


midnight blue

by ienablu



Series: passages [1]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-07
Updated: 2015-05-07
Packaged: 2018-03-29 12:56:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3897139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ienablu/pseuds/ienablu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some nights the ghost-drifting won’t abate on its own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	midnight blue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Confabulatrix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Confabulatrix/gifts).



> For fabs, for reasons she knows.

Memories play like broken records in her mind. It's ten in the morning and the third snow day this month her and Yancy and Jaz — and him and Yancy and Jaz — and her and Yancy and Jaz — and him and Yancy and Jaz are all laughing and running around the yard. Their mother reschedules her plans for the day, and despite their cajoling she stays watching at the window. Snow falls in clumped flakes from a stony gray sky, but she’s happy — he’s happy — she’s happy. She wants to build a snowman and Yancy wants to build a fort — he wants to build a fort and Yancy wants to build a snowman. Falling snow stings his face and he doesn’t want to build a wall and his arm aches every day. Jaz rolls snow into imperfect balls and throws one at Yancy's head and the next at—

The cold scatters her awake. Mako feels faintly ill, faintly cold, faintly so many things that are not all her own. The record needle keeps skipping on her thoughts. Despite the nightly occurrence, she’s not yet accustomed to it.

They are in Los Angeles, the second stop on the tour, on an undetermined number of stops. Mako has put her foot down about not going to Tokyo (not yet) and Raleigh doesn't want to return to Alaska (not yet) and Herc had asked Mako and Raleigh if they could keep Sydney far off (not yet, please). Over the years the population has ebbed, and aside from the white noise of traffic below, and the night is quiet. Outside the wide windows of her hotel room, the midnight sky is a bruised black and blue that aches beneath her ribs.

Mako rubs her sternum.

In the Academy, Drift simulations had been just that – simulations. There was no actual Drift, not between two candidates. There were concerns regarding multiple Drift partners, and it seemed safer to just put each cadet into their own simulators and link two up to each other. A hint, a taste, a tease, but not the real thing.

Mako has never Drifted before, and then she did so three times in a row, and now no dream is her own. She combs the sand garden while his classmates builds sandcastles at recess. She steps off the airplane into Sydney and Jaz is beside her chattering about how happy she is to go to a foreign country. 

The days are warmer for it, but tonight is bitingly cold as the snow drips down her face and down her unzipped winter jacket — down his face and down his unzipped winter coat — down her face and down her unzipped winter jacket — Jaz yells that he should have worn a scarf and Yancy laughs. 

The last remnant of sleep seeps from her mind. Her left arm throbs to a pulse quicker than her own. She grabs her shoulder, wills for the pain to recede, tries to massage the years of phantom pain away.

Mako has read all the research. Late nights at the Academy, accessing PPDC-authorized articles speculating on the connections between two pilots, reports from Dr. Lightcap and then Ranger Lightcap. Contact helps, no matter the context. But there leaks, and the media sensationalized the Drift bond, and every co-pilot relationship was turned sexual, no matter the reality of the situation. Some found it funny. Some did not.

In the aftermath of Operation Pitfall, the media is trying its hardest to treat her and Raleigh and Herc with respect, but gossip is persistent. Mako had requested separate rooms for them all, making her boundaries known and her own.

This is not a boundary she wants tonight.

She feels the plush of the carpet under her feet even before she slips out from under the covers. She unlocks the door, and returns to her bed. Exhaustion underlies the movement of every muscle, and she is more tired than she has felt in days.

(The next day, his mother checks in to the hospital, and nothing is the same afterwards.)

The door opens a breath later, and Raleigh slides into the room. He's wearing a baggy gray t-shirt, a baggy pair of sleeping pants, no socks. The door closes with a soft click and the deadbolt locks with a snap.

He walks into the room, and he stands by the side of the bed, waiting for a confirmation.

Mako holds the comforter open.

Raleigh slides in after her. There's a moment, a beat, a wait, and then she hears the sound of sheets shuffling, and feels him wrap an arm around her. A moment, as he waits her permission and she silently grants it, and he wraps his other arm under her, and he pulls her back flush against his front. He sighs out against her neck a moment later.

They share the next inhale and following exhale. The throb of their left shoulder retreats.

There's a hazy space between the two of them, and Mako feels like she is falling backwards and falling backwards (out of a tree in their backyard) and falling backwards (after stumbling on a stone that does not belong in the rock garden) and falling back, and Raleigh's arms are warm around her waist, pressed firm against his back, protecting her from the fall.

Raleigh presses his knee between her own. Mako runs her fingers down his arm.

Blond hair falls into his face while playing with a bokken in his father’s forge, and black hair intertwines with her siblings’ hair as they fall asleep in a pillow fort. An impulsive blue streak of hair surprises him the next morning, and she unbuttons the top collar of her tuxedo dress shirt for the spring formal. She is twelve and getting into fights at school to protect her sister from boys who tug on her hair too hard, and he is eight and keeping his mouth pressed into a thin line as he is disregarded from his family lineage.

She has lost three parents to cancer, and it has carved the same way each time.

But tonight it doesn’t have to. It won’t, in three different languages.

The white-water rapids open up to calm waters.

Slowly, together, they drift asleep.


End file.
